The latest appeal of unmanned aircraft is that they can be deployed in a variety of disaster-ravaged locations. An unmanned drone is prepared to take off March 8 at Woodbine Municipal Airport in South Jersey carrying a "femtocell" that Verizon can fly into an area that loses cellular coverage during a natural or other emergency. CAPE MAY COUNTY, N.J.-- Cell service get clobbered by a hurricane? The rash of devastating storms that knocked out power and phone service to millions in the U.S. last year laid bare how vulnerable those technological lifelines are to extreme weather. Some companies are trying to use one of this decade's coolest developments -- remote-controlled drones -- as a temporary fix.

In May 2017, the LGBT organization GLAAD posted a video on YouTube of actress Debra Messing receiving an award. In Messing's acceptance speech, she praised many Americans for supporting one another and reminisced about the show she starred in, NBC's CMCSA, 0.36% "Will and Grace," and its influence on telling the stories of members of the gay community. She also called on members of the Trump administration to "do right" by the LGBT community, by removing Steve Bannon (who has since left) from his post as President Donald Trump's chief strategist. She did not specify what her criticism of Bannon was. She also said in her speech that Ivanka Trump should work for "women's issues."

Passengers use facial recognition scanners before boarding a British Airways flight in Orlando, Fla. Brian Naylor/NPR hide caption The use of facial scanning is becoming commonplace -- maybe you've heard of the new iPhone? At the Orlando International Airport, Britain-bound passengers -- some wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and other Disney paraphernalia -- lined up at Gate 80 recently for the evening British Airways flight to London's Gatwick Airport. It looks like any other airport departure area, except for the two small gates with what look like small boxes on posts next to them. Those boxes are actually cameras. They were installed earlier this month by SITA, the Geneva-based company that develops information technology for the world's airlines, in conjunction with British Airways and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP.

Finland's prime minister Juha Sipilä has said that the country's legislation must be changed so that it will allow experimenting with Artificial Intelligence technologies faster. Talking in Turku the politician sees that Finland must already think of the next hundred years, just after it's centennial anniversary in 2017. He believeves that adopting Artificial Intelligence at scale in different fields will be key in the future. Currently one of the Nordic country's strengths is it's heavy industry, like shipyards and automotive industry in the Southwest Finland. Both are being receiving continuous investment, with the Turku shipyard training programme and expansion of the Mercedes-Benz production in Uusikaupunki.

Astronauts need a lot of help from robots. Whether it's the crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) or future recruits on missions exploring the depths of the Solar System, robots help us to complete tasks beyond our human capabilities. But what type of robots are best suited for these cosmic jobs? One NASA engineer thinks that we should turn to Star Wars for inspiration. In the popular saga, Astromechs are repair droids that act as autonomous mechanics aboard ships. They are also capable of fighting, piloting spacecraft, and just about everything else.

Facebook's decision to remove the accounts of far-right political group Britain First and its leaders is the latest instance of social media companies cracking down on hate speech after initially expressing a reluctance to engage in censorship. The company took action days after Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen were jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes. Facebook stressed that it remains an "open platform for all ideas and political speech" but said: "There are times though when legitimate political speech crosses the line and becomes hate speech designed to stir up hatred against groups in our society." It added that content posted on the Britain First Facebook page and those of Golding and Fransen had "repeatedly broken our community standards. It said: "We recently gave the administrators of the pages a written final warning, and they have continued to post content that violates our community standards.

Forecasting time series data is an important subject in economics, business, and finance. Traditionally, there are several techniques to effectively forecast the next lag of time series data such as univariate Autoregressive (AR), univariate Moving Average (MA), Simple Exponential Smoothing (SES), and more notably Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) with its many variations. In particular, ARIMA model has demonstrated its outperformance in precision and accuracy of predicting the next lags of time series. With the recent advancement in computational power of computers and more importantly developing more advanced machine learning algorithms and approaches such as deep learning, new algorithms are developed to forecast time series data. The research question investigated in this article is that whether and how the newly developed deep learning-based algorithms for forecasting time series data, such as "Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)", are superior to the traditional algorithms. The empirical studies conducted and reported in this article show that deep learning-based algorithms such as LSTM outperform traditional-based algorithms such as ARIMA model. More specifically, the average reduction in error rates obtained by LSTM is between 84 - 87 percent when compared to ARIMA indicating the superiority of LSTM to ARIMA. Furthermore, it was noticed that the number of training times, known as "epoch" in deep learning, has no effect on the performance of the trained forecast model and it exhibits a truly random behavior.

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of a concerted, ongoing operation to hack and spy on the U.S. energy grid and other critical infrastructure, and separately imposed sanctions on Russian officials for alleged high-tech interference in the 2016 American presidential election. U.S. national security officials said the FBI, the Homeland Security Department and American intelligence agencies determined that Russian intelligence and others were behind the attacks on the energy sector. The officials said the Russians deliberately chose U.S. energy industry targets, obtaining access to computer systems and then conducting "network reconnaissance" of industrial control systems that run American factories and the electricity grid. The U.S. government has helped energy businesses kick out the Russians from all systems currently known to have been penetrated, according to the officials. U.S. sanctions on Russia remain largely symbolic The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security information, left open the possibility of discovering more breaches, and said the federal government was issuing an alert to the energy industry to raise awareness about the threat and improve preparation.

"We find ourselves on the leading edge of new industrial and military revolutions, powered by AI; machine learning; and autonomous, unmanned systems and robots," Secretary Work said in CNAS' press release. "The United States must consider and prepare for the associated national security challenges – whether in cybersecurity, surveillance, disinformation, or defense. CNAS' AI Task Force will help frame the policy issues surrounding these unique challenges." The task force is part of CNAS' larger initiative on AI and global security with a roster full of individuals from the academic and tech communities, including members from Duke, Princeton and George Mason along with Cisco, BAE and PNC Bank. If you're interested, CNAS has a smattering of podcasts about AI that likely overlap with what its task force will address.

According to the government, a quarter of all telecoms satellites are "substantially built" in the UK. It hopes that with local launch capabilities, Britain can become a "one-stop shop" at the forefront of the burgeoning private space industry; not to mention the opportunities it could grant researchers and the public sector ("using satellite data and machine learning technology to support the roll out of charging points for electric vehicles," for example). There are several potential spaceport locations still under consideration, and the government has earmarked £10 million in funding that'll go towards breaking ground and complementary projects. Should a UK spaceport become a reality in the next few years, it would be the first in Europe. The European Space Agency (ESA) does have one of its own, but that's situated in the South American country of French Guiana.